Gay customer considers legal action over BT survey

By Seth Ewin • May 15, 2007 - 16:57

He is considering suing BT over how he has been treated perhaps making use of recent discrimination legislation.

5 Comments on Gay customer considers legal action over BT survey

When a you are upset by a homophobic online survey do you: a) ignore it or b) try to contact the offending organisation to express your distaste.

BT's recent online customer survey, despite being only two questions long, managed to offend twice with possible answers: "pronounced husband and wife" to the first question and "scoring a date with the opposite sex" for the second, with no gay equivalent.

Daniel Lee, 43, a customer of the telecoms giant and PinkNews.co.uk reader, decided not to ignore the matter.

He called BT, only to be rebuffed by the complaints department who Lee said told him it was "irrelevant" and would not pass him onto to anyone in authority despite him asking them three times.

Mr Lee continued to pursue the matter with BT.

"Discrimination is wrong and often continues because its victims decide to do nothing about it," he explained to PinkNews.co.uk

He was passed onto the designers of the survey, eDigital Research, who said: .

"The questions were provided by BT. Please accept our apologies if any offence has been caused.

"Unfortunately our contact for BT is away on annual leave today." said Chris Russell of eDigital said in an email to Mr Lee.

BT did finally apologise to Mr Lee over the issue but he is still not satisfied.

"All I wanted was a timely response from BT, a genuine one not spurred by media to try to quiet me from a press conference." he said.

PinkNews spoke to BT representative Leslie King who believed the matter had been resolved.

When asked about the negative response when Lee first complained King said "We never did get to the bottom of that."

Mr King said that the survey had finished now, when told it was still accessible online he said "It should have been taken down."

Mr Lee said that at present he is considering suing BT over how he has been treated perhaps making use of recent discrimination legislation that he said, "ironically came into effect less than three hours before my initial call to BT."

BT's survey was closed yesterday.

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